SCOPPA’S 2010 MIDYEAR PLAYLIST

The first half of 2010 has brought with it a boatload of memorable music, thanks to an tsunami of killer cuts from the usual suspects and recently overlooked veterans, as well as definitive tracks from a healthy number of rookies and formerly below-the-radar (my radar, at least) bands and artists. On top of that, several albums that work from start to finish have come along, demonstrating the continuing viability of the extended listening experience in an era ruled by the single and perpetuated by the public’s ever-shortening attention span. I’m referring to the instant classic Broken Bells, Spoon’s latest triumph Transference, Band of Horses’ coming-of-age opus Infinite Arms and, coming up strong on the outside, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ authoritative roots romp Mojo. There were also not one but three irresistible covers albums in Nada Surf’s If I Had a Hi-Fi, Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back and The Bird and the Bee’s love letter to Hall and Oates, Guiltless Pleasures, Vol. 1. This, I think, is a promising trend.

Before I get down to the track-by-track rollout, let me also put in a good word for some of the other gripping experiences of the year so far: the intense drama and black comedy of Nurse Jackie, the impossibly dense 30 Rock, the sensory overload of Treme, the unbearable tension of the NBA Finals, Thom Yorke and Flea’s riff on So You Think You Can Dance on stage at the Santa Barbara County Bowl, and the characteristically offbeat final act of Alex Chilton.

On this playlist, I’ve rounded up and sequenced 40 tracks, a handful of which I stumbled upon in just the last few d ays and threw in because they struck me as promising and suitably summery—this is, after all, the Fourth of July weekend. Overall, I think this batch suggests that the first year of the decade could be one to remember—and we have yet to hear Kings of Leon, Fleet Foxes or most of Arcade Fire.

OCEAN / MIDYEAR 2010 PLAYLIST

1. “Vaporize,” Broken Bells: Nobody’s made a better longplayer so far in 2010 than the perfectly matched team of James Mercer and Danger Mouse, and the latter’s arrangement on this cut, climaxing with a trumpet solo right out of the Tijuana Brass, is sublime in its detail and subtle wit, balancing the innate emotiveness of Mercer’s melodically untethered voice. Bravo, boys.

2. “I Saw the Light,” Spoon: If “I Turn My Camera On” was the Daniel and Eno’s “Emotional Rescue,” this one’s their “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’.” Here's my pick for the coolest groove of the half-year…if not the two coolest grooves. The track opens as a jacked-up, White Album-style shuffle with a lemon-tart melodic progression, but at the midway point, everything suddenly falls away as a robot drum stomp takes over, signaling the transition into a mesmerizing extended instrumental section, as a buoyant piano vamp gives way a sheet-metal guitar solo hammering away on a single chord. Awesome spinning song—but that’s generally the case with Spoon.

3. “Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren),” The Rolling Stones: Speaking of the Stones, a number of reviewers (including our own Roy Trakin) have speculated that the Exile Rarities disc is the geezers’ best chance to place an album in the year end critics’ Top 10 since, oh, 1981 or so, thanks to killer cuts like this one, with its fat-bottomed bump (sounds like Bill Wyman to me), Keith’s woozy riffage and Mick’s pimpin’ harp solo, ornamented by horn riffs that would morph into the bleats you hear on the official “Soul Survivor” (a wonderfully wobbly Keith-sung version of that one can be found here as well).

4. “Laredo,” Band of Horses: This one’s totally up my Byrds/Neil Young & Crazy Horse/Big Star alley—meaning, I suppose, that it’s essentially boy music. On this shimmering folk rock anthem, the band deftly fuses the buoyancy of “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” with the jutting-jawed physicality of “Cinnamon Girl” around a twisting riff from lead guitarist Tyler Ramsey right out of Creedence’s “Up Around the Bend.” A midtempo anthem as gorgeous as a sunrise over Ben Bridwell’s beloved Outer Banks, “Laredo” may be the most masterful appropriation of the Byrds sound since “The Ugly Truth” from Matthew Sweet’s milestone 1993 LP Altered Beast—although it has some competition from…

5. “Electrocution,” Nada Surf: …the overdriven jangle of these skillful veterans’ take on an obscure 1998 song from cult artist Bill Fox. It’s one of three tracks on the band’s engaging covers album, If I Had a Hi-Fi, that vividly reflects their roots in the chiming guitars and soaring harmonies of 1960s folk-rock; the others are Nada’s glorious re-creation of the Dwight Twilley Band’s “You Were So Warm,” cleverly suggested to them by Hits’ Karen Glauber, and, less obviously, Kate Bush’s “Love and Anger,” which they transform into a shimmering aerial ballet of pealing guitars and regal harmonies.

6. “Ocean,” The 22-20s: This track from the previously blues-rocking English trio is here because (A) it carries along the Byrds-y vibe of the two preceding tracks and (B) it provides both a title and a theme for this midyear playlist. The early-summer compilation is a decades-old tradition for me, starting in 1980 with a cassette comp (also quaintly known as a “mixtape” here in the Digital Age) I made for a Catalina vacation titled Where’s My Sandy Beach after a line in the Pretenders’ “Mystery Achievement.” I still have that tape…

7. “Candy,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Still digesting this 15-track, 65-minute record, but I can say right now with complete confidence that it’s undeniably a late-career classic for this Great American Band, with Petty writing specifically for the occasion and the rest of the crew taking it from there. For proof, check out their recent performance on SNL. This below-the-belt blues-rocker isn’t one of the two songs they played on the show, but the playfulness of its formal perfection makes me laugh every time Petty sings the opening stanza: “I sure like dat candy/I don’t go for dem turnip greens.” One obvious reference point is the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” but there’s a ton more.

8. “Burn It Down,” Los Lobos: Like the Heartbreakers’ crosstown rivals have been doing the drill so long and so fruitfully that they’ve achieved the hard-earned status of Great American Band, right alongside Petty, Campbell and company. Lobos’ upcoming Tin Can Trust can be viewed as a companion piece to Mojo: both are essentially blues-based, both draw authoritatively on American roots styles and both feature a remarkably fluent guitarist—Mike Campbell on Mojo and the humbly hell-raising David Hidalgo on Tin Can Trust. The performance here is pushed along by the thick plunks of Conrad Lozano’s fingers on a stand-up bass (he’s the American equivalent of Fleetwood Mac’s rock-steady John McVie), and culminates with the assaultive skronk of Hidalgo’s guitar fireworks.

9. “White Table,” Delta Spirit: My sleeper of the half year comes from a Long Beach band whose rootsy, acoustic-based material gets force-of-nature forward momentum from monster drummer Brandon Young—and this track is his showcase. Delta Spirit’s secret weapon, Young supercharges the largely acoustic arrangements with his ferociously propulsive stick work, bringing assertiveness and uplift everywhere. Everyone I’ve turned on to “White Table” has instantly fallen in love with it, much like two years ago when I introduced friends to Luke Reynolds’ criminally obscure Pictures and Sound…

10. “Floating in Space,” Luke Reynolds: On his eight-song mini-album Maps, Reynolds uses the same awesome rhythm section that enlivened Pictures and Sound cuts like “100 Directions” and “the Last Ocean,” but on this outing the trio is in a mellower mood, set here by the buoyant, life-embracing opener, which conveys both his depth and his disarming dudeness.

11. “Ready to Start,” Arcade Fire: Woke up this morning with the hook of this tease from The Suburbs circulating though my subconscious, which leads me to believe it could be a radio single. One of Win Butler’s more understated, lower-register vocals, which mysteriously makes the emotionality of the performance seem that much more intense, amid the pummeling drums and skyrocket sequencer oscillations.

12. “Crystalised,” The xx: What's cool and unusual about this song from XX, the half year’s second best debut album next to Broken Bells, is the way these soulful kids pump the groove into the spaces between the notes—the arrangement is so spare that silence could be seen as the lead instrument on the track.

13. “Saturday Sun,” Crowded House: The first sound you hear on the reformed band’s brand new Intriguer is the syncopated thunder of L.A. native Matt Sherrod’s drums, the earth to Neil Finn’s air as he gives flight to another elegant melody—further proof that Finn and Nick Seymour picked the right guy to fill the empty drum stool left by their fallen comrade Paul Hester. With guitarist/keyboardist Mark Hart completing the lineup, Crowded House Mk. 2 is a formidable unit, especially on stage, where they take off on extended forays behind Finn’s guitar explorations. But after this bracing start, you’ll need to have patience, because it takes several spins for the songs to sink in—which is what I’m in the middle of right now…

14. “Why Does the Wind,” Tracey Thorne: Like Intriguer, the Everything but the Girl singer’s Love and Its Opposite is an emotionally taut but musically restrained set out of which pops one dynamic exception—in this case a sensuous, Sade-style groove over which Thorn’s emphatic, no-nonsense voice glides with its trademark effortlessness—she’s a modern-day cross between Julie London and Peggy Lee. Deepening our theme, the track sounds just like a seaside summer sunset looks.

15. “Kandi,” One eskimO: Young English group makes brilliant use of a sample from a vintage single from soul singer Candi Staton, audaciously employing it the setup for a sexy call-and-response chorus hook with frontman Kristian Leontiou.

16. “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” The Bird and the Bee: When you hear that Inara George and Greg Kirsten cut an entire album of Hall & Oates covers, you'd be excused for going, "What?!" But as soon as you hear the first song, you go "Wow." Love Hall & Oates, btw. What a wonderfully nuanced vocal from Inara—her dad would be proud.

17. “That’s Not My Name,” The Ting Tings: Yup, this track is from 2008’s We Started Nothing, but it deserves the ecstatic response male/female duo Sleigh Bells are getting right now, and it makes the playlist because Katie White and Jules De Martino absolutely killed it on SNL back in January. This’ll hold me till the follow-up—reportedly titled Massage Kunst—hits later this summer.

18. “Looking East,” Jackson Browne and David Lindley: Their memorable shared history makes the former collaborators’ reunion on a 2006 tour of Spain auspicious, casual as the presentation may have been. What’s more, most of the songs Browne chose for the first disc of this two-CD set are from records on which Lindley didn’t appear, enabling the erstwhile partners to see what they could do with the material in an only slightly expanded configuration from their two-man shows in the ’70s. On the double album’s most audacious performance, Lindley picks up and pummels an oud, providing a Kaleidoscope-like exotic spin on the still timely 1996 message song.

19. “Taxi Cab,” Vampire Weekend: The brainy band’s sophomore album is so of a piece that it demands being heard as a whole—with the exception of this understated gem, which rolls along as weightlessly as a fogbank.

20. “Pow Pow,” LCD Soundsystem: Dunno what I was expecting from James Murphy after the 2007 landmark Sound of Silver, and I’m still trying to figure out what’s ticking behind This Is Happening, right down to settling on a particular cut to pull from it. For now I’m going with this homage to the Talking Heads’ Eno period, which sound intoxicating the first time I heard it, driving through Santa Barbara under starry skies after Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace show at the Bowl.

21. “Take It In,” Hot Chip: My fondness for their fanboy groove-a-rama increases with each album, and although the latest, One Life Stand, went for consistency over a roller-coaster ride, it did yield some progressively involving winners, including this poppy set piece, which they chose to use for the closer.

22. “Flume,” Peter Gabriel: Another striking covers album yielded this hushed, gorgeous ballad from Bon Iver’s 2008 stunner For Emma, Forever Ago, as Gabriel hits that oosebump-inducing leap into the first chorus without the celestial stacked harmonies of Justin Vernon’s original.

23. “Goodbye Girl,” The Shins: Mercer’s crew (whoever they are these days) covering Squeeze—how perfect is that? A wistful yet propulsive reimagining, the track is just one of several winners from the freebie online grab bag Levi’s Pioneer Sessions. While you’re on the site, you’ll also wanna download She & Him covering Rick Nelson’s “Fools Rush In,” Raphael Saadiq doing the Spinners’ “It’s a Shame” and Jason Mraz power-chording through Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.”

24. “Shot of Love,” Robert Randolph & the Family Band: T Bone Burnett combines his deep understanding of American roots music with Randolph’s grounding in gospel on the sacred steel virtuoso’s third studio album, resulting in a set of fervently funky performances steeped in authenticity and powered (like all of the producer’s sonically detailed recordings) by grooves as deep as trenches. Randolph and his rock-steady crew share space with some well chosen Burnett ringers; this song from Bob Dylan’s foray into Christianity Slow Train Comin’ gets the devil beat out of it the great by Jim Keltner, while Randolph’s buddy Ben Harper handles the lead vocal.

25. “How Do You Like Me Now,” The Heavy: This 2009 horn-powered neo-soul workout thrust its way onto the playlist after its appearance on the Kia spot that debuted during the Super Bowl. Wilson Pickett would surely approve.

26. “Heart of Steel,” Galactic featuring Irma Thomas: Gives me a chance to plug the offbeat and mesmerizing HBO series Treme, which just concluded its delectable first season, with Irma reprising her original version of “Time Is on My Side,” soon thereafter made famous by the Stones.

27. “Medicine,” Grace Potter & the Nocturnals: I’ve been friends with Grace since writing her first Hollywood Records bio back in 2005, and I’m impressed not just by her own growth but by that of her band, featuring the terrific lead guitarist Scott Tournet. Here, they crank out a steaming slab of riff rock that sounds to like the belated sequel to Heart’s “Barracuda.”

28. “Month of May,” Arcade Fire: This is a zero-to-60-in-five-seconds blast of adrenalized rock & roll—a Funeral-style explosive climax stretched over the track’s entire four-minute length. It’s like T-Rex on speed and steroids.

29. “On Main Street,” Los Lobos: As I played this cut last night, Peggy riffed on two points of reference for David Hidalgo’s vocal, both right on the money—Richard Manuel and Stevie Winwood. Think of this as Lobos’ own “Summer in the City.” And check out my review of Tin Can Trust in the upcoming Uncut.

30. “Free Love,” Cornershop: When Nick Lowe went country (so to speak) back in the ’90s, he left the job of purveying pure pop for now people in the capable hands of Tjinder Singh, who proceeded to stake his claim with the classic “Brimful of Asha,” and has subsequently spun out some of the wittiest rock & roll of the last two decades. Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast, Singh and partner Ben Ayres seem (among other things) to be riffing on the Beatles’ fascination with Indian music, breaking out the sitars and tablas and mixing them in with their standard Western instruments…or have they come up with their own twisted version of A.R. Rahmann’s Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack? Quite possibly both. But I can state with confidence that this mesmerizing soundscape is Judy’s “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It came on as four of us were pulling into the driveway after dinner at Ammo, and none of us got out of the car until it was over.

31. “Running Man’s Bible,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: The groove reminds me of “Breakdown”; Petty’s lyric reminds me of all the years that have passed since then. And the band plays on…

32. “The Mystery Zone,” Spoon: The title song of my early-2010 playlist, this one’s a tension builder with a springy groove and Revolver­-like lysergic string-synth billows. It follow’ the band’s leitmotif on Transference, it’s ending sheared off like a Marine recruit’s hair.

33. “Agony of Laffitte,” Nada Surf: In which one stellar smart-pop band not only covers another one but also brings something of its own stylishness to the party—check out the gorgeous contrapuntal harmonies, which serve to illuminate the beauty of Britt Daniel’s melody. Interestingly, Nada’s elegant treatment takes the song from acid putdown to fluttering rhapsody.

34. “The Ghost Inside,” Broken Bells: Here, Mercer communes with his inner falsetto soul man over DM’s lustrous groove as the duo treads on Gnarls Barkley turf.

35. “Dilly,” Band of Horses: Here’s vivid proof that Band of Horses are no longer just a front for Ben Bridwell—this infectious power-pop song is one of lead guitarist Tyler Ramsey’s strong contributions, as he puts himself into a featured role alongside the frontman.

36. “The River,” Audra Mae: The lyrical precision of Leonard Cohen converges with the dangerous undertow of Amy Winehouse on this dreamscape, awash in water symbolism.

37. “The Shores,” The Sea of Cortez: I was initially trying to keep the playlist to 25, then 30—but when I grabbed this download of a brand new song because of the band name and title, I figured, what the heck, it’s a holiday. It turns out to be an indie-rock update of one of those Beach Boys coastal panoramas from early ’70s LPs like Sunflower and Holland—meaning it’ll fit right in alongside Fleet Foxes when their much-anticipate follow-up hits.

38. “Waves,” Holly Miranda: Extending the aural sea foam is this enigmatic indie singer/songwriter (if Kristen Stewart hasn’t heard her yet, it’s essentially that she do so immediately), who doesn’t forget about putting a groove underneath her mood, which was the most important lesson of Portishead’s now-iconic Dummy.

39. “The Suburbs,” Arcade Fire: I promised myself I wouldn’t throw in three tracks from any one act, but c’mon, this new Arcade Fire stuff is epic. People who have grabbed the blithely floated links to four tracks are mostly gaga over “Ready to Start,” myself included, but don’t overlook this one—widescreen, poignant and seductively detailed, like a Todd Haynes movie.

40. “Heaven and Earth,” Blitzen Trapper: If John Ford were still around, he’d use this band for the score of his next western. Cue the orchestra…

FIRST DRAFT: BAND OF HORSES' INFINITE ARMS

A revised version of the following review appears in the June issue of Uncut.

BAND OF HORSES

Infinite Arms

Fat Possum/Columbia

Five stars

Ben Bridwell’s promise is fulfilled, as the budding auteur and his handpicked band fashion a thrilling artistic breakthrough

After living with the lush melodies, breathtaking harmonies and taut instrumental performances that distinguish Infinite Arms, I no longer think of Band of Horses as another promising Amerindie band. From the very first notes of their primarily self-produced third album, it’s dramatically apparent that Ben Bridwell and company have upped the ante big time, creating a musical statement that manages to consistently hit and frequently surpass the peak moments on their previous recordings. Having relocated from Seattle to his native South Carolina, Bridwell has surrounded himself with four talented and like-minded players in drummer Creighton Barrett, keyboard player Ryan Monroe, lead guitarist Tyler Ramsey and bassist Bill Reynolds. The stabilization of BOH’s long-shifting lineup is one of the reasons the new album is so cohesive, so accomplished and so timeless.

On the stunning “Laredo,” the band deftly fuses the buoyancy of the Byrds “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” with the jutting-jawed physicality of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Cinnamon Girl” around a twisting riff from Ramsey right out of Creedence’s “Up Around the Bend.” First single “Compliments” features the harmonies of Ramsey and Monroe over a “London Calling” strut, and their three-part blend with Bridwell recalls the Jayhawks of Hollywood Town Hall. These rich group harmonies make several memorable reappearances, turning up in close-miked intimacy on Ramsey’s candlelit ballad “Evening Kitchen” accompanied by just a single acoustic, and in full-throated splendor on the Morgan-penned, pedal-steel-adorned country-rocker “Older.” All of the above tracks were cut live off the floor, lending them a glorious immediacy. They co-exist with shimmering monuments of aural architecture, painstakingly assembled, their intricacies illuminated by Dave Sardy’s 3-D mix.

There’s an intriguing further development in Bridwell’s songwriting approach, as he interweaves the elliptical verbiage of his past records with concrete detail of an intensely visual nature, these observations of everyday life hinting at storylines whose specifics are left to the listener to piece together. First track “Factory” opens in a hotel lobby, leading to brief eye contact with a stranger in the elevator, a stop at the snack machine and other mundane details that take on an air of mystery through the musical context, conjuring up the sort of hyper-reality found in William Eggleston’s photographs. The pumping strings and horns riding atop the band’s massive slow-motion groove bring an overlay of grandeur to the implied narrative – the pomp-plus-push of the arrangement redolent of the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” while Bridwell’s layered vocals pause to inhale before delivering the astral lift of Bon Iver’s “Flume.” These musical and visual juxtapositions permeate the album, taking centerstage on “Northwest Apartment,” a nostalgic, atypically straightforward series of aural snapshots picturing various places where Bridwell crashed while living in Seattle and touring the region; they’re paired with pile-driving drums and bludgeoning guitars, ending with the hum of an amp hanging in the air like a receding memory.

One of the album’s defining aspects is its vivid sense of the American expanse, from the close quarters of city life to the wide-open spaces. With its Pet Sounds-like contrapuntal harmonies and reverb-drenched sonics, “On My Way Home” resonates with SoCal buoyancy even as it yearns for Dixie. It segues into the title track, a dreamscape that inhabits the woodsy Northwestern terrain of Fleet Foxes, with Bridwell’s stacked harmonies stretching heavenward through the orchestral bowers of a Memotron (a digitized version of the Mellotron). The tender “For Annabelle,” written in Minnesota just before the birth of Bridwell’s daughter, poetically suggests a sun-dappled spring day in the upper Midwest. The high, lonesome group harmonies that open the culminating, thematically unifying “Neighbor” are a dead ringer for the Eagles of “Peaceful, Easy Feeling,” but at the 3:30 mark the track erupts like Mt. St. Helen’s, ending the record on a note of flat-out majesty.

Infinite Arms feels like it has two halves, the first six songs serving to expand the panoramic sound and style Bridwell introduced on songs like “The Great Salt Lake” from BOH’s 2006 debut, Everything All the Time, the second half-dozen, led off by the aerodynamic power pop of Ramsey and Bridwell’s “Dilly,” is laden with wholly and co-written songs from the other players, reinforcing the sense that this is a fully interactive band. But its symmetry is just one of the reasons you’ll want to get this neoclassic landmark on vinyl. Another is that it begs to be flipped over and played again.

Q&A: Ben Bridwell

You’ve said that in many ways this is the first Band of Horses album. How so?

It’s the first time the lineup hasn’t been this revolving door. I feel like the band has really solidified itself for the first time. When I started the band and Matt [Brooke] was in it, I had some songwriting input from him. With this record it’s like a real band, no one’s goin’ anywhere and everyone’s contributing to the songwriting process. This is a band that I’m a part of now and not just leading, and this is our coming-out party to show people everybody in the band, not just my sad songs.

Your harmonies with Tyler and Ryan are really classic.
There are times when you can hear that maybe it’s not perfect, and because we were doing it live and didn’t really have anyone to judge us, I tended to feel like that was its strength and not try to make it perfect like we’ve done in the past. Like maybe those little frailties are actually the strength of the record, where it sounds like people are actually singing around a microphone.

What inspired the orchestrations of “Factory”?
I was listening to a lot of Nick Drake, for the first time really got Nick Drake. I had to hear every song, watch every bit of footage. There are such dramatic string arrangements in those songs. But I’ve also been a huge fan of Spiritualized, and I did want to go for that kind of dramatic effect in “Bittersweet Symphony.” It was very intentional, most because I was thinkin’ this might be one that people in the U.K. could latch onto.

Your lyrics this time are loaded with everyday detail.

In the past my lyrics were more abstract. I didn’t mean to be more to the point in these songs; they just kinda came out that way. I guess the song was askin’ for it, and that’s what I had and could speak from those experiences, so I didn’t shy away from it. But I don’t write lyrics deliberately, ever – they just kinda come. And usually I’ll edit them to death so that people have absolutely no idea what I’m talkin’ about. Maybe I decided to unmask them a little bit more.

This feels very much like an old-fashioned two-sided record.

When I approved the vinyl master the other day, I got to hear it, finally, as a piece of music, and it flows so much better as two sides. There really are two phases of the record, and the second side really does showcase the rest of the band. You get Tyler’s songs and Ryan’s song in there – it’s almost like a hint of the future of what we might be able to accomplish.

THOM YORKE’S RHAPSODY IN RHYTHM

Although nobody thinks of Radiohead as a dance band, Thom Yorke and his mates have spent the last decade developing an intoxicating rhythmic feel. Unveiled spectacularly on 200’s Kid A, the group’s embrace of the groove in all its heady and visceral nuances reached a sublime level of refinement on the tracks “15 Step,” “Bodysnatchers,” “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” “The Reckoner” and “Jigsaw Falling Into place” from the 2007 masterpiece In Rainbows. And those grooves have been physically manifested onstage by Yorke’s spastic bobblehead moves at the mic, along with the pugilistic body language of Colin Greenwood as he relentlessly stalks the groove, putting his full weight behind each punching bassline.

In general, latter-day Radiohead’s infectious rhythms pose a life-embracing counterpoint to its zeitgeist-capturing themes of anxiety, alienation and information overload. These seductive rhythmic foundations, combined with the melodic aeronautics carried by Yorke’s fallen angel’s voice, render even the darkest of the band’s songs—which might be unbearably oppressive otherwise—deeply spiritual and downright inspiring.

The Eraser, Yorke’s 2006 boy-with-his-laptop album, served to isolate his innate feel for rhythm, subtly but emphatically revealing the source of Radiohead’s unique rhythmic character. Little did we—or he—know that four years later, these intensely solitary tracks would serve as the blueprint for a “jungle dance party,” as Live Music Blog’s Justin wrote of the April 16 Oakland performance on Atoms for Peace’s eight-date mini-tour, culminating in a Sunday night set at Coachella. The performances were fueled by high-octane rhythms that “didn’t pound so much as undulate, complementing Yorke’s airy vocal melodies,” according to the Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot, getting to the jist of the experience. That he put together a carefully selected crew of players to explore this set of songs, as well as some new material and a handful of Radiohead staples, turns out to have been yet another stroke of genius on the part of the cerebral frontman.

I caught Saturday night’s show, which went down in the sylvan hillside setting of the Santa Barbara County Bowl, a venue that seems to bring out the best in the acts that play there. It was Yorke’s third experience at the Bowl, following 2001 and 2008 Radiohead shows, and I strongly suspect he purposely chose it, having experienced its unmatched vibe potential.

On the drive up the 101 from L.A., I played The Eraser from start to finish, and, moody as it may be, my wife Peggy found the music “comforting”—but she’s a huge fan. We’re both quite familiar with “Black Swan,” “Clocks” and the extended version of “Harrowdown Hill,” having pedaled along to these pulsing beauties in countless spinning sessions at the gym, and hearing them again ramped up our anticipation.

We were not disappointed. The band—with Flea acting as co-frontman, while producer Nigel Godrich provided the color on electronic keys and guitar, on top of the primally sophisticated percussion laid down by Beck drummer (and son of Lenny) Joey Waronker and Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco of Forro in the Dark—was on fire from the first notes of “The Eraser,” as Yorke revisited the nine-track album in sequence. But what cinched the deal for us was the dancing of Yorke, as the grooves he’d dreamed up got him moving in controlled abandon, transforming him into the alt-rock equivalent of Michael Jackson, while on the other side of the stage, Flea jerked around as if being jolted by a syncopated series of electric shocks. Both were dancing machines—we couldn’t take our eyes off of them.

The first half of the set reached its delirious climax with “Harrowdown Hill,” punctuated by its delectable bassline, played with calibrated ferocity by Flea, while Yorke swayed along, singing the irresistible chorus, which Peggy and I have come to think of as an expression of a romantic oneness, despite the sobering premise of the lyric: “I'm coming home/I'm coming home/to make it all right/so dry your eyes/We think the same things at the same time/We just can’t do anything about it.”

The solo section that followed, which changed from night to night, began with the gorgeous new ballad “Give Up the Ghost,” nicely described by Steve Appleton in his review for Rollingstone.com: “He tapped the microphone to create a steady beat, looped it, added vocal parts and looped that, then played a melancholic riff with a Neil Young twang. "I've had my fill, in your arms, in your arms," he sang in a quiet, almost spooked state.” Yorke then slid behind the upright piano at stage left for a dusky take on In Rainbows closer “Videotape,” followed by a haunting performance of Kid A’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” its crystalline beauty italicized by the intimate purity of the presentation.

It was during this mini-set that Yorke’s vocal brilliance was showcased, but it was dramatically evident throughout the night. As the San Jose Mercury News’ Jim Harrington insightfully noted in his review of the previous night’s Oakland show, “He focused on delivering moods, not messages, and mumbled through his lyrics in a fashion that made his voice translate like another instrument onstage. His understanding of rhythm and cadence challenged that of a veteran jazz scat singer."

The band returned to blissfully wrap up the evening with the eerie Hail to the Thief B-side “Paperbag Writer,” bleeding into the intense new song “Judge, Jury & Executioner.” The 90-minute show came to a close with “The Hollow Earth” and “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses,” both of which left a far deeper impression in the masterful hands of the band than they did in their original versions, released as two sides of a single last fall, inspiring a shimmying, limbs-akimbo freakout from Yorke.

As we walked down the hill, Peggy gave a spot-on assessment of the performance. “You know that I get bored easily at shows, but I wasn’t bored for one second tonight. They were just incredible.”

Great minds think alike.

ROUGH DRAFT: SPOON’S TRANSFERENCE

When I was doing A&R late in the previous century, a musician in one of my bands—it might have been Jolene guitarist Dave Burris—expressed a then-popular theory about when to stop working on a piece. There’s an inherent danger in the act of refining a track, he asserted, because its initial vitality is frequently lost in the quest for perfection. The same danger exists in critical writing, he added; we were talking about a review I was working on at the time. I’ve thought of this notion often over the ensuing years while polishing reviews and features, especially when pruning copy to get it down to the called-for word count.

I was most recently reminded of it just the other day while rereading my 650-word Uncut review of Spoon’s latest LP after playing the record more obsessively than anything I’ve fallen in love with since Radiohead’s In Rainbows, an album that I kept unpeeling like an onion, just as I’m doing now with Transference. And watching footage on YouTube of Spoon’s withering KCRW mini-set has only served to deepen the feeling that there was so much more I could’ve said about the band and the record. Then I remembered that I had said quite a bit more in the first draft of the review, which was roughly twice the length of the published version. Reading over the first draft just minutes ago, I was gratified to find I’d nailed what now seems to me to be special about the album during my initial listening experience back in early November – despite the fact that all I had to go on was a 128 kbps stream. Which goes to show you that a great record is gonna sound great no matter the degree of accuracy in which it’s delivered or what kind of speakers you’re hearing it through. So here’s the undoctored draft. It seems fitting that I put it out there in this non-tweaked form considering so much of Transference is built on Britt’s original demos.

Spoon
Transference
(Merge U.S., Anti- U.K.)

“This one is pure Spoon,” offered Britt Daniel, auteur of the veteran indie band, describing his seventh album on spoontheband.com. “For better and worse and all of it.” Taking Daniel at his word, we have no choice but to examine Transference, while comparing the LP to its predecessors, in order to locate its quintessential Spoon-ness.

Temple, Texas, native Daniel formed the band in Austin with drummer Jim Eno in 1994, scuffling along for six years and releasing a pair of unexceptional albums before the partners hit upon the sound that would carry them through the decade, generating one of the noughties’ most distinctive bodies of work, while drawing a loyal constituency as ready for anything as Wilco’s.

“The only epiphany I ever had was between A Series of Sneaks and Girls Can Tell,” Daniel told me during a 2005 interview for a Paste feature. “I realized there were no rules that I should play by. I felt like we no longer had to limit ourselves to being guitar, bass and drums kind of band. I started thinking to myself, ‘Do my favorite records play by those rules? Does What’s Going On play by those rules? There are all these great styles of music that I appreciate, and I don’t feel like I’m really taking advantage of everything I could—every instrument or arrangement idea—by sticking to just guitar/bass/drums rock songs.’ That opened the door to a lot of things.”

The eureka moment occurred on “Everything Hits At Once,” the opening track of 2000’s Girls Can Tell, instantly drawing up the blueprint for the mature Spoon sound: spare, propulsive, brainy, obsessively detailed, self-effacing and progressively insinuating. They eliminated anything not essential to the movement and character of a track, doing so with a conceptual purposefulness as rigorous as Radiohead’s. Daniel and Eno perfected that sound two years later on the masterfully distilled Kill the Moonlight, with its stripped-down, amped-up Beatle-isms, following it in 2005 with the more expansive Gimme Fiction, paced by the Prince-meets-“Emotional Rescue” refracted soul of “I Turn My Camera On” and the intimated grandeur of “My Mathematical Mind.” Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the band’s U.S. commercial breakthrough, was Spoon’s most unremittingly infectious set, powered by three of the band’s most immediately accessible tunes: the Jon Brion-produced single “The Underdog,” the hooky “You Got Yr Cherry Bomb” and the finger-snapping “Don’t You Evah.”

The basis of Spoon’s blueprint is the groove, set down by Eno’s massive, Bonham-like snare hits and Charlie Watts-style behind-the-beat momentum, the feel ineffably human yet so utterly precise that you’d think it must be machine-made. It isn’t just the drums—there’s no part on any Spoon record without some essential rhythmic component, notably, Daniel’s staccato guitar riffage, percussive piano runs and in-your-face tambourine and handclap accents. On top of all this bounce, Daniel unreels lyrics littered with Dylanesque non-sequiturs and sly humor, delivered with a deadpan offhandedness punctuated by bursts of overt emotion, as he speaks for the fucked-over in life and in love, the disenfranchised, the underdogs.

Spartan in its sparseness, impeccably crafted, monochromatic, desert-dry in both tone and attitude, Transference eschews conventional verse/chorus/bridge song structure altogether; instead, the band establishes a musical premise and rides it for all it’s worth, like a souped-up roadster racing along an arrow-straight ribbon of highway toward the horizon. The songs seem to blaze past, like the two-minute eruptions of Please Please Me, but only two of the 11 tracks are under three minutes, though only one exceeds five. There’s not a wasted note anywhere—something the band’s rabid fans have some to expect as a given—as Spoon spits out analog sonics with binary efficiency.

True to form, the opening “Before Destruction” functions as both a palate cleanser and a preview of what is about to transpire. It seems as if we’re eavesdropping on Daniel, sitting alone in a room, singing as if to himself and strumming an acoustic, but the arrangement soon turns exotic as a chorale of overdubbed and treated voices floats in, with an ambient electronic drone lurking in the background. “Is Love Forever?,” which follows, turns on Spoon’s signature rhythmic starkness, the spaces between sounds as palpable as the sounds themselves, but here the drums are chopped and channeled. Spoon’s go-to percussion instrument, the tambourine, enters, but only for a few bars. From there it’s just a naked chord progression with another electric keyboard barely there, as Daniel asks, perched uncertainly between guilelessness and cynicism, “Is love forever?/Are you quite certain, love?”

The textural and thematic building blocks having been laid out, the band begins to stack them up with “The Mystery Zone,” a tension builder with Revolver­-like lysergic keyboard/string accents and a percolating beat. Now, this is quintessential Spoon: Beatles + Prince. The eerie “Who Makes Your Money” features burbling keyboard chords over a drum loop; hooking you when it kicks into double time in mid-song behind a staccato rhythm guitar run through Euro-synth bleats. That sets up “Written in Reverse,” the band’s biggest-scaled track since “My Mathematical Mind,” as a brief lounge piano intro opens into squalling guitar, tinkling piano, cable-thick bassline and the anxious repeated line, “It’s all I know/it’s all I know.” The track ratchets up to unbearable intensity behind a ferocious one-note solo that recalls Dr. Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson. They keep things heated up with the epic “I Saw the Light,” an epic with a lemon-tart melodic progression. An abrupt shift into a robot drum stomp signals the transition into a lengthy instrumental section that is one of the album’s most captivating segments, as a gorgeous piano passage is assaulted by a sheet-metal guitar solo, only to drop away into what sounds like a cue from a French movie score.

The album’s fiercely sustained tension, a relentless push/pull between Eno’s pummeling back-beats and Daniel’s forward-leaning guitar lines and vocal spurts, suddenly dissipates two-thirds of the way through, as the clatter of “Trouble Comes Running,” boasting trash-can cymbals and guitar overtones that will slice the top of your head off, cedes the foreground to the drum-less, muted piano ballad “Goodnight Laura,” its apparent antecedent “I’m in Love With a Girl” from Big Star’s Radio City. Here, without warning, Daniel turns unexpectedly unguarded, nary a trace of irony or distance in his vocal—it’s the biggest surprise on the record. The sense of tenderness continues with “Out Go the Lights,” its tone ghostly and panoramic, like Captain Beefheart’s “My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains,” Daniel’s voice Lennon-esque in its clutched understatement, achieving a lump-in-the-throat poignancy without descending into mere sentiment.

The dry heat returns with “Got Nuffin,” a dusky, percussive rocker about darkness and shadows with a trampolining Leslie guitar riff nagged by the incessant plink-plink of a piano. If U2 did something like this, they’d restore their cred in the space of four minutes. Finally, on the closing “Nobody Gets Me but You,” super-compressed drums reference “I Turn My Camera On,” while Daniel bites off a lyric that could serve as a love letter to the band’s fans. “Nobody gets me but you,” he sings in that unmistakable rasp, “No one gets what I’m doin’.” Over string-like accents, the tone turns urgent, and Daniel lands a few well-timed jabs before the groove takes over, as they end the album perched between 1966 and 2012.

Daniel and Eno worked without a producer for the first time in search of the aforementioned “pure Spoon,” and this is the challenging, take-no-prisoners result, an audacious fusion of the reliable and the experimental – a record that gets the new decade off to an audacious start.

Q&A: Britt Daniel

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was loaded with relatively conventional, overtly hooky pop songs, whereas this album is stripped to the bone.
With each record you react to the one before, and the songs on this record are constructed in a different way. For instance, “The Underdog” has a zillion chords and a ton of different parts; same thing for “Don’t Make Me a Target.” A lot of songs on this record ended up having very few chords; it was more about setting something up, getting in a mood and sticking with it. There’s something real hardcore about playing one chord or one riff for four minutes. It’s just a different kind of good, and I wanted to see if we could do that kind of good.

But why mess with a winning formula?
More than anything, I just wanted to push myself. This is our seventh record, and at some point you’ve gotta stop thinking about topping yourself and go in a different direction. If you keep trying to make the same record and topping yourself, you’ll lose your mind. That kind of thinking is why Brian Wilson lost his mind.

In that sense, was the idea of you and Jim working without a producer another way of reshuffling the cards?
It was also a way of staying absolutely hardcore to what feels right first to us. Good things come from working with a producer too, because you’ve got two different aesthetics that you’re trying to please, and when you’re both happy, that’s what ends up being on the record. That’s a great way to work, but I wanted to try it where we’re pleasing only ourselves, not having to think about anybody else in considering the fidelity, structure, production style, what kind of instruments are used. Just hardcore what we want – hardcore Spoon.

You’ve gone away from the piano, which has been big part of your sound since Kill the Moonlight. This album is full of angular, Wire-y guitar. What was behind that? I wanted it to be a more angular, new wave, weirder record.